Wednesday, October 1, 2014

October catch up...

Looking at the number of blogs I need to write to reach my goal and I really need to step it up for the last 3 months of the year! So not like me to procrastinate. Oh, wait, that's totally like me.

So anyway, I can't really do a blog a day challenge for October. We are travelling a couple of times and trying to write while on the road is tricky. I don't lug my laptop around and writing on the phone is a huge PITA. So instead I am going to do 31 Blogs in October.

Same sort of challenge, just a little different. You math geniuses out there have figured out that means that there will be days with multiple postings. You are all so smart! Head of the class! Gold Stars and Cookies for everyone! This also means that I have no expectation of you all keeping up with each post. Not that I do normally, but you are even more off the hook for this go round. Bad enough when I do a blog a day to keep up, let alone multiple postings in one day right? So anyway...here we go! Thirty One Blogs for October!

So yesterday I wrote a quick short story and I said I would write later about where the idea came from. Guess what? It's later!

So first off, if you haven't already read the story from yesterday go and do that before you read the rest of this blog. I'll wait...

Do you ever dream you can fly? I know it's a pretty common one. I've never actually had that dream. Not real flying. The soaring above everything like Superman flying. But I dream I can glide a lot. And vividly. To the point where while I am dreaming about it I think to myself in the dream,"See? You knew you could do it." So what is the difference between gliding and flying? I dream that when I run I only need to take a few steps to cross a lot of ground. Like when I push off I could go through the whole house before touching ground again. Gliding. And the dreams are so real that I am sort of surprised the next day when I can't really do it.

The second part is with my insomnia often I don't sleep but I do deep relaxation. Sort of a self hypnosis thing. Relax your feet, relax your legs, that sort of thing. And I noticed that when I am really deeply relaxed I sort of melt in to the bed. Like the feeling of where I end and the bed begins is gone. Which almost then feels like I am floating. Not on the bed but above it. Just relaxing there.

So as I was drifting off to sleep the other night I thought to myself, "What if all of this time I hadn't been dreaming. I really could float and glide? What if it was just my conscious brain holding me down. What would that be like?"

And that's how the story started.

So I wrote it out. And as I was writing I went from being sure that she really was starting to float to questioning it. What if she was imagining the whole thing? Which would be worse really? And I put the story in to my "more later" file. Because though I had a story I wanted to tell with an ending I wanted to use as I wrote I realized I might have a different story in there after all. I went in and adjusted the end on the blog short story just a touch and then left it for later.

Which happens a lot as I'm writing. And it's really hard to explain. Because I'm the one writing the story right? I should be able to mold it and make it what I imagined. But sometimes the characters don't want to say what you think they should say. Sometimes the ending that you KNEW was perfect doesn't come about. Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of a story and have no idea where exactly it came from.